are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
1980s
Source: EWD648.
“How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?”
1980s
Source: EWD648.
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Edsger W. Dijkstra 68
Dutch computer scientist 1930–2002Related quotes
“Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.”
1990s
Source: On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991), p. 80
“Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide.”
Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 15
“The line between failure and success is so fine… that we are often on the line and do not know it.”
“Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.”
Quoted from Motley's conversation by his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1858), ch. 6, p. 143.
“There's no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible...”
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)
“Elegant as simplicity, and warm
As ecstasy.”
Source: Table Talk (1782), Line 588.
A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work